Settlements End Suits Over Raids By Officials

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Published: June 4, 2011

Two groups of plaintiffs have settled lawsuits against law enforcement agencies that raided several St. Paul buildings in advance of the 2008 Republican National Convention, searching for information about protests or unlawful activities. Items seized in the raids, according to court documents, included pamphlets titled ''Wash Your Own Dishes'' and ''Activists' Guide to Basic First Aid.''

At one house, the authorities searched heavy boxes that they suspected contained weapons, but found only vegan literature.

The settlements brought to a close one of the more controversial chapters of the convention: raids involving heavily armed police officers who arrived at homes and a protest-planning headquarters the weekend before the Republican gathering.

Dozens of people said they were handcuffed, photographed and detained at gunpoint. A handful of people were arrested during the raids, but most were released without charges.

One settlement, announced Friday, ended a suit against Robert Fletcher, then the sheriff of Ramsey County, Minn., and members of his department. The department agreed to pay the six plaintiffs, described as the owners of the seized documents, $27,000.

The lawsuit asserted that while raiding three homes in Minneapolis and a protest-organizing headquarters in St. Paul, officers seized literature, pamphlets, buttons, leaflets and books that were constitutionally protected.

Besides the pamphlets on washing dishes and first aid, the authorities confiscated a booklet titled ''Eternal War on the Hitler Youth'' and fliers calling upon people to protest the convention or blockade the streets.

The Ramsey County Sheriff's Department, which is based in St. Paul, had said the homes it searched were inhabited by people connected to an anarchist organization called the R.N.C. Welcoming Committee. A copy of a warrant for one house said the police were authorized to look for a laundry list of items, including firebombs, brake fluid, photographs and maps of St. Paul, paint, computers and camera equipment, and documents and other communications.

Residents of the houses where the warrants were served denied having any unlawful or dangerous materials.

''I think this is a classic case where, in my opinion, they massively exceeded the scope of the warrant and swept up any literature they did not want out on the street during the convention,'' said Teresa Nelson, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota.

A lawyer representing Ramsey County did not immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment.

The other settlement, announced last week, resolved a federal lawsuit filed against members of the St. Paul Police Department and the F.B.I. after the police handcuffed and detained 10 people in a house in St. Paul for several hours. Although nobody was arrested, some of the people said their computers and phones had been searched.

Among them were members of I-Witness Video, a New York City-based collectivethat assembled videotape evidence during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York that was used to impeach sworn testimony by police officers in cases stemming from that convention.

An affidavit submitted in support of a search warrant for the home cited 21 heavy packages that had been delivered there and stated that an F.B.I. agent ''has information from a reliable source that the packages contained weapons that are to be used during the R.N.C.'' No weapons were found.

One of the three plaintiffs, Kris Hermes, a political activist from California who was inside the house, said that most of the $50,000 settlement would be donated to nonprofit groups, including one called the Committee to Stop F.B.I. Repression.

''We decided we would take the money we could get and put it into worthy causes,'' he said Friday. ''There was some poetic justice about taking money from the federal government because of the actions of the F.B.I.''